MediaMonkey, Remotes and Mobile Listening

Discussion about anything that might be of interest to MediaMonkey users.

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sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

MediaMonkey, Remotes and Mobile Listening

Post by sirandar »

A few comments on MediaMonkey’s place in the music sphere

1) Remote control of Media Monkey with an IPAD

I have a 2 level house with a Mediamonkey PC connected to central AV unit connected to speakers upstairs and down.

Got an IPAD for free and discovered that it makes a great remote control for Media Monkey via the IPAD App MonkeyMote. I have been messing with remotes for MM for years and have gone with the simple Inteliremote from Melloware and the ATI Remote Wonder because it always works with no hassle. It allows me to adjust volume and advance track and a few other simple things. All the other solutions I have tried are unreliable and more trouble than it was worth.

IPAD MonkeyMote allows full control of MediaMonkey from anywhere in my house via WiFi. It is smooth and the connection is stable and the IPAD battery lasts a very long time. This adds up to a great remote that works when you actually need it anywhere in your house.

There is an Android App that works just as well via a phone but WiFi sucks the battery life out of the phone and when you get home you often need to charge the phone, which means no remote.

2) On-line Music Services

With the exception of Samsung (who is currently being sued) all the major phone manufacturers including Google are deliberately crippling their phones so there is no way to get data on or off then except via the Internet or Wifi. The usual way is to remove microSD slots, not support MicroSD to Go, and only have 16 or 32 GB Internal memory and not supporting the OGG format. This is happening just as the major players have introduced On-line Music.

Apple and Google would like to "coax" us into storing our music on their on-line servers. That is a win win for them as they can charge for the on-line storage (Google probably will eventually) and they can very easily track what kind of music people actually buy (or steal). They use this information to populate their on-line store with music they don't already have. It is free data metrics from people serious enough about music to have a decent library and upload it (uploading is a huge pain).

This isn't such a bad way to go but the support and infrastructure just isn't there yet and nothing can even remotely compete with a large microSD card. MicroSD is being phased out way too early.

A decent collection requires at least 32GB storage at 96kps OGG. Nothing can replace microSD for the quality of service and 64GB and 128GB cards are now available.

On-line Music Storage is the perfect solution to the above limitations on paper but in reality is doesn’t even come close the convenience and reliability of having your mobile music on a large microSD card. The problems are:

1) It takes forever (sometimes weeks) to upload your music to Google’s or Apple’s servers and your Internet connection will be near unusable during that time. Apples’s Match service is supposed to reduce this upload time but unless you have very mainstream music a big hunk of you collection will still need to be uploaded ……. 2800 tracks in my case which would take about a week straight on my fast cable Internet.
2) No wireless data connection ……… no music
3) The data is streamed which means it skips when on Wifi if the data flow is choppy …. And it is in many places. The very first place I tried Apple Itunes Match, the song skipped when I tried a Cloud track (Tim Hortons, Guelph). Airport Wifi is usually very spotty.
4) Playing music uses your Cell Phone data plan
5) It takes about 30sec to play any track from on-line
6) Using Itunes Match means that you can’t sync with MM or have any local music files, as the Match library is the only one that will play and it deletes any synced tracks .

You could also use MM to stream your collection, but that requires a stable internet connection, wireless data connection and streaming which could never be as fast and accessible as microSD

So why would anyone use these services when you could load up your music library on a microSD card. Simple, with the exception of Samsung, the cellphone and tablet makers won’t let you. Even Blackberry .... I was surprised when the Playbook didn't have microSD and didn't support OGG .... I might have bought one it it did as it would have been a great mobile music device and a tablet.

It will be interesting to see what will happen when the Microsoft Surface comes out that can actually run Windows&7 Apps. Theoretically it could run MediaMonkey natively and it has both full USB ports and microSD. If it is small and light enough it could be a great mobile tablet/music solution.

3) ITunes trashes your Media Monkey Library


Letting Itunes access your MM library trashes it. If I didn't have a very recent full backup of my library it would have takes days for me to fix the damage done. Itunes handles Album Art is a very sloppy and unreliable manner.
Peace through music
Melloware
Posts: 339
Joined: Mon Aug 18, 2008 9:46 am
Location: Philadelphia, PA, US
Contact:

Re: MediaMonkey, Remotes and Mobile Listening

Post by Melloware »

Sirtandar,

On item 1) did you evaluate MonkeyTunes? It is supported on iOS with the Apple Remote app and on Android by TunesRemote+ and HyperFine Remote.

http://melloware.com/monkeytunes/

Just thought I would mention it.
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